


Our Struggle

by gwinne



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Pregnancy, medical rape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-27
Updated: 2018-11-27
Packaged: 2019-09-01 08:58:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16762024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwinne/pseuds/gwinne
Summary: I really struggle with My Struggle IV.  It completely undoes everything that we saw in Ghouli, which felt like a satisfying resolution to an unsatisfying character arc, and I also don’t buy a miraculous late life pregnancy for Scully.  But for myself, I can’t write an AU.  As much as I resented the turn to undo My Struggle II with Scully’s “vision,” I think that strategy opens up all possibilities for shared nightmares for these characters.  What if William isn’t a monster, but has come to think of himself as one?  This fic tries to make sense of the Struggles within the larger arc of the series, including the rest of season 11.





	Our Struggle

**Author's Note:**

> I really struggle with My Struggle IV. It completely undoes everything that we saw in Ghouli, which felt like a satisfying resolution to an unsatisfying character arc, and I also don’t buy a miraculous late life pregnancy for Scully. But for myself, I can’t write an AU. As much as I resented the turn to undo My Struggle II with Scully’s “vision,” I think that strategy opens up all possibilities for shared nightmares for these characters. What if William isn’t a monster, but has come to think of himself as one? This fic tries to make sense of the Struggles within the larger arc of the series, including the rest of season 11.

In the church, she whispered to Mulder that she wanted to come home. She’d moved back in, more or less, when her condo had blown up. But the house was Mulder’s; as long as she’d lived there, it was never really hers. She wanted to build a home with him, go to IKEA, get new furniture, buy some lamps and a set of dishes that matched, maybe set out to find their son. She didn’t want a wedding. She wanted a do over. 

When William was a baby and she was alone, she couldn’t protect him. That’s what she’d told herself and Mulder, but the truth, as she worried it down like a stone over the years, was more complicated; she didn’t know how to manage single motherhood and postpartum depression in the middle of a global conspiracy. Then, Mulder was back, and they were on the run, and she had no desire to break up what she knew to be a family. They couldn’t just find him and raise a child driving cross country, couldn’t take him away from the only parents he’d known beyond infancy. Now her son, their son, was seventeen, and homeless, and on the run from the shadowy forces out to get them. She knew whatever home they cobbled together would not be an image from a Pottery Barn catalog, but maybe it would give them an anchor, if not also some peace. What had she and Mulder been fighting for, all this time, if not for justice for their family? What were The X-files for, if not William? Come home, my son, she whispered in the dark, come home.

*

All his life he’d wondered why he was given up. It’s not that he didn’t have a good life. His parents paid for baseball gloves and trips to the Dairy Queen, all the mundane activities of middle-class childhood. They loved him. He came to them like an answered prayer. This is what they told him; this is what he believed. Still, she came to him in in waves, not so much with his mind but even deeper; he remembered a smell and the sound of her voice singing. He understood she could only have been his biological mother. Then, the nightmares began.

He dreamed of viral apocalypse, alien colonization. He dreamed his parents murdered. He dreamed of fetuses in laboratories swimming in green fluid.  
Ghouli started as fantasy, a dark fiction in which he could explore his darkest fears. Then he lost control. What he unleashed in Ghouli was untameable. At times, he’d told the therapist his parents had sought out for him, he felt like a monster. The power he had within to kill, if he needed to, or to heal. There was no book he could buy at the local Barnes and Noble on how to cope if you’re the product of intergalactic conspiracy. It was what she worried about, that everything that had been done to her had created not a miracle baby but a monster, an experiment built in a government lab, not the everyday miracle of sperm meets egg. This fear ran between them now like an umbilical cord. 

He didn’t know any more if they were his dreams or hers or something they created and shared in hypnogogic states. Whatever it was, he’d unleashed it; his parents died, he almost killed his girlfriends, and now he didn’t know what else to do.

*

He drove west. He made it as far as Texas and then drove North. He made a square across the Midwest and ended up back in Virginia. Something pulled him back like a beacon. The visions had quieted after he’d seen her, the redheaded FBI agent he now knew to be his biological mother, but they hadn’t stopped. He heard the words like her heart beat, steady, come home, come home, come home. He did.

(to be continued)


End file.
